Shal: ‘My god is the steppe’

Qasım (Erbolat Toǵyzaqov) in Shal

Another film by Ermek Tursynov (the director of Kelin), 2012’s Shal (Шал, The Old Man) is a cinematic transposition of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea onto the Kazakh steppes. However, this brief description elides the important continuities between Shal and Tursynov’s former film Kelin.

Certain themes explored by Kelin are more deeply explored in Shal: the tension and the continuity between the generations; the closeness of the ‘Kazakh soul’ to nature; the duality of natural forces and will; the shamanic sense of tragœdy inherent to a præ-Abrahamic worldview. Certain motifs – both musical and cinematographic – also provide a sense of continuity between the two films. The shots of wildlife and natural vistas of steppe and tundra are exquisite (though the latter are sometimes rendered a bit claustrophobic by the often-present obscuring fog), and they are bolstered by a soundtrack which makes generous use of traditional flutes and fiddles. In general, Shal showcases to a greater extent than Kelin, the æsthetic-spiritual point Tursynov tries to drive home about Kazakh identity and the incompletion and ‘thinness’ of her Muslim formation in contrast to the ‘thickness’ of her affinity with and attachment to the native landscapes and œcosystems which she inhabits. Ideologically speaking, Shal (and Kelin) stand in contrast to the grand national narrative put forward by Kóshpendiler and Jaýjúrek myń bala: not necessarily in terms of what they count as the Kazakh virtues and heroic excellence, but rather in terms of how they characterise the faith of the Kazakh people.

Shal follows Qasım (Erbolat Toǵyzaqov), an elderly gentleman living in rural Kazakhstan who has an obsession with football – spending much of his time watching what games he can on his rickety and temperamental antenna. (Qasım even goes so far as to name all of his sheep after famous footballers, and paints their wool with their team numbers.) He is aided by his truculent, disrespectful handheld console-playing grandson Eraly – whom the old man calls his ‘little Satan’, and who in turn swears he’d rather hang himself than end up like his grandfather. One day a group of Kazakh and Russian men, led by a wealthy hunter (Ondasyn Besıkbasov) roll up in a fancy Humvee, setting out to snag some wolf pelts. Qasım shows them the way to the hunting ground, but warns them that it’s the off season and the wolves will have just borne their pups. The hunters don’t regard his warning, and drive off anyway. Qasım, taking his sheep out to pasture onto the steppe, gets lost in the fog. He hears gunshots out on the steppe as the hunt he aided goes badly wrong, and subsequently he is thrown into a bloody and harrowing game of survival, pitting man (and horse, and sheep) against wolf.

This, like Kelin, is a survival film – and, indeed, more explicitly so. Like Kelin, too, there is a North Asian shamanic undercurrent that underscores the visceral connexion between man and nature, and the porous divide between the realms of death and life. There is a deep and sacred connexion, too, between the young and the old, and the turn of the generations which was the penultimate punchline of Kelin.

Qasım may not always get along well with Eraly, but he clearly loves the boy – and it is this love which, he confesses to a wolf-hunter (the one played by Ondasyn Besıkbasov) he rescues, drives his will to survive. Eraly, too, loves his grandfather more than he lets on. Early on, after the old man falls asleep when watching television, Eraly covers him with a blanket. Later, when Qasım goes missing, it is Eraly who runs off to ask his uncle and neighbours where he has gone, and Eraly who calls for and then joins the official search parties that go in search. Shal also functions as something of a bildungsroman for Eraly, who is growing into the ways of Kazakh manhood. In fact, one could see in Eraly a bit of spiritual kinship with the more mild-mannered and easy-going Qarluq in Mori Kaoru’s Otoyomegatari. But the turn of the generations is marked in several other intersecting ways. Not just Qasım and Eraly, but also the pregnant ewe who gives birth to a lamb in the middle of a brushfire during a wolf attack. Also, in fact, the alpha female and her cub. It is a testament to Tursynov’s remarkable direction, that this bloody contest between nature and human being, which claims so many casualties – a contest which is in several points hinted at being a supernatural one – leaves the viewer at the end feeling more sympathy for the wolves than for their hunters.

Technology – and especially technological failure or insufficiency – is also a major recurring theme in Shal. The implicit critique of television and video games is present in the early relationship of Qasım to his grandson – and it’s worth noting that the film neither singles out the youth for his technological addiction, nor does it write Eraly off as irrevocably spoiled. Still, the handheld console is presented to us as an obstacle, as is the old television antenna. Elsewhere ‘gadgets’ appear, they always seem to fail in their intended purpose. The hunters disturb the balance of nature with their Humvee and their guns – both of which are ineffective at protecting them when the wolves attack. When Qasım discovers the hunters’ SUV – abandoned – the tablet with Google maps doesn’t help him get back to safety, and when he picks up one of the dead hunters’ ringing cellphone, he can’t understand the voice on the other end nor she him. (Ultimately, the cellphone serves as a deadweight makeshift grave marker for its owner.) And the helicopters and SUVs the rescue party uses are ultimately of no use in finding the lost and dying Qasım: it is only a grandson’s spiritual, instinctive-intuitive connexion to his grandfather that is shown as effective, when he turns back away from the search party and finds his bleeding grandfather lying down a gully in the snow.

There is a bit of perhaps-inadvertent Christian imagery here which Tursynov may have inherited from Hemingway: Qasım’s bleeding wounds during his last-stand fight with the wolves are on his arms, on his ankles and in his side, and he defends himself with a carpenter’s hatchet. In addition, as a literal shepherd, he sacrifices himself in an attempt to save what is left of his flock. But the explicit religious message of the film is not even Muslim, but (crypto-)Tengriist. When Qasım and the hunter are talking with each other at a campfire, Qasım reveals that he has never made the pilgrimage to Mecca as his ancestors had done – instead, the steppe is his both his place of pilgrimage and his god.

Toǵyzaqov’s acting in this film is phenomenal. A somewhat cantankerous but mostly good-humoured and gentle (except when riled) old man who alternately prays to and rails at the open steppe in his solitary wanderings with his sheep, he easily and naturally evokes our sympathy as viewers. Though Tursynov’s favoured direction is still minimalist – whether in dialogue or in music – the approach he took with Toǵyzaqov in Shal is perhaps more effective than the somewhat artificial silence he enforced on the characters in Kelin.

Shal, like Kelin, is a beautiful but harrowing watch – Tursynov is a master of building and maintaining dramatic tension across a movie which, despite its ninety-minute runtime, often takes the leisurely pace fitting to the lost old man at its centre. In addition, it seems that Tursynov better managed to get across his point about national character and priorities – the Kazakhs’ closeness to the land and potential pitfalls in relying on high technology and modern creature comforts against an often-precarious œcological balance of which the people are very much a part. Exploring both figuratively and literally a foggy liminal borderland between the realms of life and death as well as between the realm of the human and the realm of the nature gods, Shal manages to synthesise and articulate the strong points of both Kelin and Ulzhan without the silent-film obscurity of the former or the meandering pretentiousness of the latter.